PHP and MySQL Web Development: A Beginner’s Guide

Part III

Creating and Using Relational Databases with MySQL

In Chapters 7 and 8, you saw how with PHP you can read and write a disk file. While that worked, it was limited in that you had to read the entire file into memory and search it there to do what was needed. In Part III, you’ll see how MySQL, a full-fledged relational database management system (RDBMS), greatly enhances the process of reading, writing, maintaining, changing, searching, and rearranging information stored in computer files. It is the third major tool used to make websites dynamic, and while a website requires HTML and PHP in addition to MySQL, MySQL does the heavy lifting when it comes to the handling of data.

Chapter 9 introduces databases and describes what makes them ...